I've always been thinking of a way to make wikis a personal productivity tool in addition to being a collaboration tool. I think i've thought of something interesting along those lines.

This is the idea of making TWiki something like a notebook: I may not want to go to all the trouble of adding a link to a web home page, but i'd like to quickly add (for instance) a technique or web page note etc.

To do this, I propose a "new topic" button that would require a category be entered in addition to the new topic title. The new topic title would in turn be added to the existing (or new as needs be) category page, perhaps even in date or alphabetical order as chosen by a category page preference.

This differs from the typical way of making a new topic in that I don't first have to add the wikiword to an existing topic, then click on it to provoke TWiki into displaying the new topic page.

I think this could look like a regular edit page with 2 additional controls: the top one would be a category list drop down (with the option of adding a new category, and a topic title edit box. The rest of the page is the standard edit topic text editing control etc.

What you propose can already be done with the current TWiki engine. Here at the Codev web we ask for a topic name for a brainstorming idea (see FeatureBrainstorming). This can be extended to ask for the category as in this example: (edit the page to see how it works)

Hmm. For our novices it would be useful if when they type in such boxes "If I dont take out the spaces or capitalise" it turns it into the topic "IfIDontTakeOutTheSpacesOrCapitalise" rather than "IfIdonttakeoutthespacesorcapitalise".

Peter this does not work (as far as I can tell) in the way that in envision. I want the ability to create a new category at the time that i'm creating a new topic and have that new category be a page that contains a link to the new and any subsequent topics in that category like a table of contents. FeatureBrainstorming has the TOC feature, but does not have the new category feature in the same place.

Let me give an example. I have a TWiki called "Python Notes". It contains various categories pertaining to the location of applications on the web, programming techniques etc. As i'm working, I come across a useful technique for doing binary I/O and I want to make a note about it.

In the current TWiki, if I want to put that into a new non-exisiting category called "Python I/O", I'll have to jump through some number of hoops to do so. I'll have to find the category topic ("Topic Classification"), edit it to add "Python I/O", create the "Python I/O" page, Insert "BinaryIO" as a topic on that page and then, finally I get to write up my Python Binary I/O trick. Not only did it blow spontenaety out the window, it turned a brief note into a full blown task of it's own. Even if the new category topic page has the FeatureBrainstorming format, that saves only one step, that of entering the new topic name.

My scheme could be realized as a create button on every page. When this create button is pressed, a "dialog page" comes up asking what the new category and/or page is to be called. In the first scenario, an existing category is selected and a topic name is entered. TWiki adds the topic to the category page and puts me on a topic edit page so that I can create my new note. In the second scenario, TWiki creates the new category page, adds a link to my new topic and puts me on a topic edit page so that I can create my new note. (Consideration might be given to not adding the new link until the user hits the submit button on the preview page so that the user can cancel and back out of creating the note - and potentially the new category.)

I would also like to point out that using the "go" box to create new pages isn't all that intuitive. Even as a moderately experienced TWiki user, I have to think for a second to connect "create a new page" with "enter something in the go window". Note, there is also no clear instruction to a user on what do do on the "do you want to create a new topic" page if you want to back out/cancel. A minor nit but important for new users.

David, I do find your explanation hard to follow. The current category system requires a template file to be changed which you don't mention. The new form based system uses topics. So you should be able to write a plugin that manipulates the relavent topic. The beta also has the parent facility, which not what you are asking for, does give structure in a broadly similar way.